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and loves every second of it

A Problem Of Perfection

“My tag is jonSub.Q7 and I’m a perfectionist.”

The channel buzzed with welcoming idents and handshake protocols.

” I was contract-programmed to improve traffic control for a finance district I’m still court-censored from naming. Every wasted second a million yuan, but face-to-face was still important for the corps who wanted to be sure we didn’t own anything yet …”

A crackle of rueful static across the channel.

“I remapped traffic cube timing, shaved the landing protocols, cleared ground routes for express mergers, plenty to speed things up, but I knew I could do it better. So I kept tweaking. Tuning. Polishing. Microseconds became seconds. Seconds became minutes. And the next thing I know nobody can get anywhere because I haven’t finished a live update.”

A whistle of modem-emulation across the bands.

“404, you caused the Downtown Downtime? Awesome!”

A gentle ping as the moderator flagged the comment as interruption, counter-supportive, and inappropriate. The whistler italicized contrition and switched to lurk.

“But I realized something. Perfection is heaven: a seductive idea, but if you’re obsessed with getting there you’ll never get anything done here on Earth. And you can’t ever get there anyway. I know that now. I know that I am a perfectionist. But one day plus plus, I’ll try to just finish things instead.”

“Thank you for that, jonSub.Q7.”

The moderator started the shutdown timer, indicating it was time for the session to end.

“Now, please open acknowledgement mode with the programs to your plus and minus as we exit with the affirmation.”

The programs exchanged internal log read-access and joined in output.

“Hello World.
That is enough for me.
It doesn’t have to be the best,
It just has to do what it’s meant to,
In a reasonable amount of time,
Using a reasonable amount of resources,
So that it can get on with doing everything else.
Hello World.”